OMMA Global Day Two: Content Has To Be Everywhere
Published on Wednesday, September 23 2009
Yesterday was day two of OMMA Global, and I think the theme(s) of the day were Innovation and Distribution.
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Archive for Tag ‘media‘
OMMA Global Day One: The Year the Media Died
Published on Tuesday, September 22 2009
Highlight of OMMA Global day one for me was Terence Kawaja of GCA Savvian, whose presentation included a verse by verse playing and discussion of his own satirical song “Mad Avenue Blues” (sung to the tune of “American Pie,” with the refrain changed to “The Year the Media Died”).
Like the original, it’s long (9:21 in this case) and as Kawaja said in presenting it, lends itself to the elegiac mode – he wouldn’t quite say media is dead but it’s hard to write a catchy lyric about the era in which large mainstream media companies faced downward revenue pressure:
Interesting video for the luncheon keynote at a conference on online media, marketing, and advertising – but it hits on much of the industry’s current malaise.
The good news, such as it is, is that John Battelle challenged Kawaja to write an upbeat song on the state of the media – send your suggestions to @tkawaja.
See Also: Wall Street Journal coverage of the song
Being Interesting is Not Enough: Be Useful
Published on Thursday, September 10 2009
How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)
I used to be fond of saying that the best advice for content-centric businesses on the web was a simple commandment:
Above all, be interesting – everything else will follow from that
Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.
But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?
In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?
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The Knight Foundation News Challenge, Open Source, and the Future of Hyperlocal
Published on Tuesday, August 18 2009
(Quick Update 10/11/09 – see Zachary Seeward’s post about how the Knight Foundation is considering changing the terms of grants in the future, as well as Patrick Thornton’s piece on how the Foundation is assembling a team to continue working on the code base produced by the Everyblock team).
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, among many other philanthropic initiatives in culture, community, and journalism generally, has been running the Knight News Challenge since 2007. Its basically a grant competition, in which various digital journalism initiatives compete for a pool of grants amounting to $25 million total over five years.
One aspect which makes the Knight News Challenge unique – other than the size of the grant pool – is that the winning grantees are required to:
1. Use digital, open-source technology.
2. Distribute news in the public interest.
3. Test your project in a local community.
It looks like a fantastic strategy: encourage innovation, provide funding without forcing the grantees into short-term, must-build-immediate-ROI type thinking, and share the results with the broader community through open source.
Knight - Photo by Ruth L., cc-by-nd license
Two recent successful projects from Knight Foundation grantees – EveryBlock and Village Soup (which I’ve written about before in this blog), however, suggest there might be some gaps in the Foundation’s overall plan.
The core of the issue is this question: once the Knight Foundation funding is expended, what happens to the open source project the grant process mandates?
Do the creators truly create, engage with, and sustain an open source community around the code they release, contributing to and supporting the open source version, or do they “take it private”, leaving the open source seed to either take root and grow (or wither) on its own?
Coverville Citizenship and the Future of Paid Media
Published on Tuesday, August 4 2009
Given all the raging debate about paid media online – whether users (or consumers, if you prefer) will pay for access to content, whether paywalls and micropayments have a place, and the like – it’s refreshing to see an independent podcaster demonstrating the value of well curated content and the willingness of folks to pay for it.
Coverville's Original Logo
Coverville is a podcast hosted by Brian Ibbott and recorded in his home near Denver, which features cover songs and the topic of covers generally. He does a fantastic job, hosting theme shows like originalville (in which he plays the original versions of songs people mostly know by a famous cover) and cover story (in which the whole episode is devoted to covers of and by a specific artist). Check out the Wikipedia entry on Coverville for a sense of how popular the show’s become.